If, as Don DeLillo opined when he read from Underworld
in Dublin, ‘Lists are a form of cultural hysteria’, where does
that leave the unfortunate anthologist, as lonely in his or her
obsessive passion as Nabokov with his lepidoptery? Collecting, selecting,
anatomising and itemising are sad pursuits, best suited to those
of a saturnine temperament, with its implication of suspicious tendencies
towards melancholia.

But not, of course, if those who embark on such
enterprises enjoy the delusion that they are imposing a little order
on chaos, even as a perverse strategy for keeping Life, with all
its risks and terrors, at bay. Besides, the foregoing character
sketch hardly seems applicable to the tirelessly energetic and ubiquitous
Colm Toibin since, along with his Booker-nominated novel The
Blackwater Lightship, his pamphlet The Irish Famine,
and The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since
1950, co-edited with Carmen Callil, this handsomely-produced
anthology of Irish fiction is only his fourth publication
this year, although the idea behind an exercise as ultimately fatuous
as The Modern Library shows all the signs of severe pre-
(whisper it!) millennium tension.

Toibin provides a lively and provocative introduction
here (perhaps his chief reason for undertaking the whole onerous
task?), in which he advances the thesis that:

Ireland, from the time of Jonathan Swift to the
present, has been,

it seems, awash with ‘national and intellectual
mood’, especially

national mood, so that those writers who have
sought to evade

the opportunities to interpret this, who have
sought to deal

with the individual mood, however trivial, perverse
and fleeting,

seem now oddly heroic and hard to place. The purpose
of much

Irish fiction, it seems, is to become involved
in the Irish argument,

and the purpose of much Irish criticism has been
to relate the fiction

to the argument.

Later, intercut with his short discussion of Beckett,
the flip side of this view is expanded fruitfully:

In 1929 the Censorship of Publications Act was
passed in Ireland,

and work by most Irish writers and many foreign
writers was banned;

this did not encourage Irish writers to feel that
there was an audience

out there hungry for their work. The sense that
there was no reader

fed into a tradition which was already strong
in Irish writing, a tradition

which insisted that a book could read itself,
hermetically sealed in a deep

self-consciousness. From Tristram Shandy to
Ulysses to At Swim

Two Birds to Beckett’s fiction to John
Banville’s Birchwood to John

McGahern’s The Pornographer, pastiche and
parody combine with the

idea of the built-in reader.

This line of thought is taken into the present
with the astute observation that:

While there has been stylistic innovation in the
work of, say, Anne

Enright and Roddy Doyle and Patrick McCabe and
Aidan Mathews,

a playing with tone, an ability to write sentences
like no one had

ever written them before, most of the work being
produced in

Ireland now is formally conservative. This may
be because, for the

first time, there is an audience for books in
Ireland. You can have

readers outside the book as well as within it.
This new conservatism

among fiction writers both north and south of
the border is most

clear when you compare the calmness of contemporary
Irish writing

with the wildness of contemporary Scottish writing.
It is as

though the legacy of Sterne and Swift, Joyce,
Beckett and Flann

O’Brien had taken the Larne-Stranraer ferry; in
the writing of

James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Irvine Welsh, Janice
Galloway and

Alan Warner there is political anger, stylistic
experiment and formal

trickery. Books are written, as in Ireland in
the old days, to replace

a country.

While A L Kennedy is a glaring omission from this
list, readers of the current issue of Graph magazine will
know that I made a broadly similar point in my review of the terribly
uneven Shenanigans anthology. Personally, I find myself making
that ferry journey more and more frequently, both literally and
in my work, since it is salutary to take a break from an Ireland
wallowing unprecedentedly in a sea of manufactured consent and consumer
blandness. Despite the prevailing mood that Ireland is now the best
little country under the sun (if it only had some sun) and everybody’s
happy nowadays, I take the contrary view that books still need to
be written to replace it.

Toibin shows admirable restraint in ‘including
himself out’ of this anthology, as it were, but it would be interesting
to know where he would place his own fiction within this general
rubric, since as readers of last month’s issue of this magazine
will have gathered, I found his own most recent novel highly conservative
formally, and ‘calm’ to the point of catatonia. Also, he has never
been behind the door when it comes to relating Irish fiction to
the Irish argument.

Elsewhere in the introduction he declares, somewhat
contentiously, that ‘John McGahern is the Irish writer who has worked
best within that tradition (ie of melancholy) and produced the most
impressive body of work of any Irish writer in the second half of
the century.’ Toibin’s ambivalent attitude to the achievement of
that other John - Banville - is curious, since on the one hand he
tries to co-opt Birchwood as a revisionist text, while on
the other admitting that ‘...to match his work with changes in the
society is to belittle it and miss its point.’ There is more than
a hint of professional jealousy in the observation that ‘Banville’s
tone is often Olympian; the lives of mere mortals are both beyond
him and beneath his contempt;...’, although this is mitigated somewhat
by ‘...and yet he writes with a pure wonder about the world and
its central mysteries.’ Banville’s fiction is full of characters
who get their hands dirty, and there is always a layer of self-irony
shading into self-loathing about his isolated, high, cold narrators
who find that they cannot function at the quotidian level.

When it comes to the inclusions/exclusions game,
while the flyleaf blurb’s contention that the book ‘...represents
the entire canon of Irish fiction in English from Jonathan Swift,
born in 1667, to Emma Donaghue, born in 1969’ blatantly offers hostages
to fortune, most of what one would expect to find between the covers
of such a venture is to be found here, along with some interesting
oddities. These include extracts from Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered
Philanthropists, Katherine Cecil Thurston’s The Fly on the
Wheel, K Arnold Price’s The New Perspective, and Seosamh
Mac Grinna’s story ‘On the Empty Shore’ (a translation, let it be
known). Some would cavil at the presence of Anthony Trollope or
Iris Murdoch, but not I. Women are well represented, with Frances
Sheridan, Lady Morgan, Rosa Mulholland and Emily Lawless from the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with the more obvious
Maria Edgeworth and Somerville and Ross, so there won’t be the same
furore which greeted the three volume Field Day Anthology on
the score of female under-representation.

It is the contemporary scene, of course, which
will invite most comment. While all those here are perfectly justified,
the following, in no particular order, and whatever one’s personal
opinion as to the value of their work, might have cause for feeling
aggrieved at being passed over: John Montague; Niall Quinn; Eilis
Ni Dhuibhne; Angela Bourke; Ronan Bennett; John MacKenna; Mary O’Donnell;
Ferdia McAnna; Christopher Nolan; Michael Collins; Eamon Delaney;
Philip McCann; Sara Berkeley; Katy Hayes; Anne Haverty; Martin Healy;
Eamonn Sweeney; Mike McCormack; Frank McCourt and Emer Martin, and
if I’ve neglected anyone else who feels left out, I apologise. As
regards specific selections, most are representative of the individual
writer’s work as a whole, insofar as such detached snatches can
ever hope to be. (By the by, on an editorial note, the last twelve
paragraphs of Neil Jordan’s ‘Night in Tunisia’ have unaccountably
gone missing.)

Toibin’s introduction ends with the swipe that
Dublin, ‘...for the first time in its long life in fiction, has
become post-Freudian and post-feminist and, of course (three cheers!),
post-nationalist.’ Would that it were so. More so, would that we
were not so nervously preoccupied with wishing it were so. Even
more so, would that it were not the bogus internationalism fostered
by globalisation that was trying to take its place. In the nationalist/revisionist
debate that has raged for close on the past twenty years, I refuse
to take sides, as I see little point in replacing a worn out set
of clichés with a fresh set. Besides, I’ve had my bellyful
of all this incessant navel-gazing about Irish identity. If, as
Bernard Shaw observed, a healthy nation no more thinks about its
identity than a healthy man thinks about his body, then signs on
Ireland is still in a very sick and pallorous state indeed, even
if many of the ailments and much of the disease are iatrogenic in
origin.

Toibin first made his name as a journalist and
commentator, before he started writing fiction, and it is not stretching
things to advance the proposition that he fancies himself one of
the doctors. While the recent profile of him in The Phoenix
magazine, which portrayed him as a networking schmoozer who in his
efforts to become a power-broker punches above his weight, may have
been overly unkind, he does seem always only too ready at the drop
of a hat to throw in his tuppence worth about the State of the Nation
and the Issues of the Day. To this end, he has never been averse
to taking Dr O’Reilly’s shilling at the Sunday Independent,
but then again, he’s a lot wealthier than I. While one would be
hard put to detect a thorough-going hidden agenda at work in this
anthology, what’s worrying is that Toibin’s political sympathies
might impinge on his aesthetic judgements. (Was his presence as
a judge of this year’s Sunday Tribune/Hennessy Literary Awards,
announced last week, a contributory factor in the passing over of
Blanaid McKinney’s ‘Big Mouth’, easily the most well-written, thought-provoking
and compelling of the nominated stories by a country mile, simply
because the piece engaged with the kind of IRA violence we all want
to forget now?)

More worrying for Toibin himself as an artist
is that the evident enthusiasm he displays for taking on all these
sidebar, extra-curricular activities, even if they are not so much
a means of increasing his own standing and that of his fiction as
a way of staving off the dreaded ennui, may divert his attention
away from that fiction, and have a deleterious affect on quality
control.

All this aside, while The Penguin Book of Irish
Fiction cannot hope to rival TheField Day Anthology
when it comes to being comprehensive and definitive, especially
given the imminent publication of a fourth volume of the latter
supposed to rectify the female omissions, it is certainly, despite
its not inconsiderable bulk, a lot more portable. It should prove
popular with students at the survey stage in Irish Studies on British
and American campuses, a kind of Norton of Irish Literature. When
all is said and done, it is without doubt a welcome addition to
my shelves. God knows, all this cataloguing and classifying is a
dirty job, but apparently someone’s got to do it.